The More Things Change, the More They Stay Rigged

The president* dropped by Missouri on Wednesday to unveil his most recent pipe dream, this one concerning the tax code. Naturally, he was short on details, but he did say he wants a 15 percent corporate tax code, and he wants Congress to take the lead in passing it and whatever else he comes up with, which will be called The American Plan—which, if I recall correctly, was the name of a union-busting strategy undertaken by American manufacturers in the 1920s. (In the hostelry industry, it means you get three meals a day, which, under the other definition, no factory worker could afford anyway.) Meanwhile, of course, back in Washington, according to the Associated Press, Republican economic policy continued on in its customary heartless way.

The pending reduction to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief account is part of a spending bill that the House is scheduled to consider next week when Congress returns from its August recess. The $876 million cut, part of the 1,305-page measure's homeland security section, pays for roughly half the cost of Trump's down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall. It seems sure that GOP leaders will move to reverse the disaster aid cut next week. The optics are politically bad and there's only $2.3 billion remaining in disaster coffers.

Comically awful.

The usual vagueness of the new tax program leaves a lot of room for mischief on behalf of the Republican Congress, the members of which must be sick now of hearing how they've been putting up with the hijinks from Camp Runamuck because using the tax code to shove even more wealth upwards is the only true faith. From CNN:

"We're here today to launch our plans to bring back Main Street by reducing the crumbling burden on our companies and on our workers," Trump said in Springfield, Missouri. "The foundation of our job creation agenda is to fundamentally reform our tax code for the first time in more than 30 years."

This already is being identified by many pundits as a return to the "populist economic message" that they like to believe was the key to the president* 's electoral college triumph.

The Trump administration outlined the broad strokes of its proposal for tax reform in April, proposing slashing the number of tax brackets from seven to three and bringing the corporate tax rate down to 15%. It also called for income tax brackets to be set at 10%, 25% and 35% -- the latter for the wealthiest Americans, down from the current 39.6% rate.But since the administration released that outline, it agreed to give the reins on tax reform to Congress -- working with leaders as part of the "Group of Six" to come up with a single Republican tax reform plan that leaders hope will earn broad support in Congress.

Under no circumstances can this plan be called "populist" unless the definition of that word has been changed to "whatever we can get the rubes to believe." The first round will come from the House, where zombie-eyed granny starver Speaker Paul Ryan is putatively in charge, and nobody believes in the supply-side fairy more fervently than he does. That bill will be a horror in many levels. The president* might even call it mean.

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